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Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

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Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#51

Post by CharlieDigital »

the_snooze wrote: post #45
CharlieDigital wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, but that doesn't meet the definition for a monopoly; that's just inertia.

I'd argue it's more than "just inertia." It's that end-users don't have any real meaningful choice. If you deviate from the standard in your field (MS Office in my case), you take on immense costs for minimal gain. Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position. They may not be a monopoly in the strict sense (and I never said they were), but they're not a passive player ei…

    > Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position
For the edification of the readership, please share how Microsoft's business decisions are being made to maintain a monopoly in your space. Are they buying out competitors? Are they using contract terms that forbid the use of other vendors? Are they under-pricing their product relative to the market?

If the cost of migrating results in "minimal gain", doesn't that mean that they have a top product and the market has other competitive products by definition?

If you can provide some evidence of how they actively use business practices to maintain a monopoly, it would go a long way to advancing this discussion instead of showing long-held biases and I'm sure some lawyers out there would be ready to make a name for themselves.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#52

Post by CharlieDigital »

BartjeD wrote: post #48
CharlieDigital wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, but that doesn't meet the definition for a monopoly; that's just inertia.

A monopoly is measured in a given market by marketshare. Ofcourse the existence of 10 alternatives is meaningless if they count for 0.01% of given market section. Lol

Find any definition of "monopoly" and it should be pretty clear that it's not merely marketshare but the active manipulation of markets and market conditions to produce that marketshare.

    > A monopoly is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.
^ Wikipedia def is a prime example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly)

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#53

Post by pjmlp »

neutronicus wrote: post #30
pjmlp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the point the whole desktop development experience makes us grey hairs miss Balmer. Nadella would rather sell thin clients into Azure OS mainframe.

It definitely seems like Visual Studio is no longer feeling the love. IMO Visual Studio presented an incredible opportunity to sell Copilot. Implement a MCP server, give the LLMs in Copilot all the tools available to a human developer to analyze and debug a codebase. Instead it's just a shitty autocomplete you have to turn off in order to get the good, IntelliSense autocomplete working. Our parent company went hilt-d…

You need to jump into VS 2026 for those goodies.

It was so rushed out, that many of the dialog windows on the new settings pane show tiny VS 2022 settings dialogs as popups.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#55

Post by [deleted] »

deaux wrote: post #6

Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization. They must have some personal incentive in one way or another to keep close to the status quo. Anyone large organization has ever moved away from dependency on US BigTech has done so piece by piece. China is the prime example. They've been decreasing their dependencies every year back from when it was at…

[deleted]

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#56

Post by svilen_dobrev »

in 6th edition of Ian Sommerville's "Software engineering" textbook, there was a whole chapter on legacy software. How to fix, how to emulate, copy, migrate, whatever. Technical issues slowly progressing into human/social. Maybe because it was after the y2k. Then in 8th, it got merged into other sub/chapters, and later ones the topic is even more muddied. There's no more legacy software, right? Except there is.. all of it may become a burden, because of time or because of politics.

Come on, that is an University, there are many many students eager to learn the art-of-migration, for free. Migrate away, one by one, department by department if needs be. Disable M$ Excel, give everyone Libreoffice , python, r, or any-other-linux-stuff, and if the professors are so wooden, let the students find a way to replace that wonder.xls with something else. Then repeat with next piece of the entanglement..

But, no, only complaining (a.k.a. need more money)

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#57

Post by gabrielgio »

johnwheeler wrote: post #29
deaux wrote: post #6

Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization. They must have some personal incentive in one way or another to keep close to the status quo. Anyone large organization has ever moved away from dependency on US BigTech has done so piece by piece. China is the prime example. They've been decreasing their dependencies every year back from when it was at…

I think China generally pirates all of our software in the U.S.

That is a common practice. For example, look it up on the history of Swiss Pharma industry. They grew from pirating to enforcer once they got industry lead. I pretty sure we can find examples for US, Japan, India and what not. Only the country on top of a given sector care about enforcing patent.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#58

Post by Forgeties79 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #22
Forgeties79 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that really matters when we are assessing whether something is a monopoly or not.

Well, I don't know how you define it, but here's Wiki's first paragraph[0]: > A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell') is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high mon…

You are using the dictionary definition of monopoly, not the legal definition according to any particular nation’s laws or looking at how it has been enforced/on what basis, which is the only version that really matters in this discussion.

I imagine everyone on HN knows that simply linking Wikipedia is generally considered little more than a snarky, passive aggressive response. I don’t need the dictionary or Wikipedia definition of a monopoly for this conversation. I didn’t ask for it and you know that it wasn’t necessary or productive.

If you want to have an actual discussion I’m all ears.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#60

Post by AuthAuth »

the_snooze wrote: post #18
CharlieDigital wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because there's decades of processes built around it That's not Microsoft's problem; Microsoft isn't broadly writing legislation that compels the use of `.docx` format and PDFs are a thing.

I never said it was Microsoft's problem. I'm just showing you that "oh, switch to something else" is a naive view if you actually have real work to do.

Someones template breaking is not a real problem. The office alternatives work perfectly fine for "real work". If your template doesnt work fix it. You fixed it all those times it broke on office.
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